Liberals petition against Bachmann on Intel panel

The liberal group People For the American Way delivered 178,000 petitions to House Speaker John Boehner Monday urging him to remove Minnesota Republican Michele Bachmann from the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

The group says that 4,500 of the signers are from Minnesota, about 400 of them from Bachmann’s district.

If the move is largely a piece of political theater, it follows another bit of Washington dramatics: Bachmann’s 2012 request for investigations into alleged Islamic “influence operations” inside the Pentagon, the State Department, and other government agencies.

The group noted that Bachmann earned rebukes from Boehner, Sen. John McCain and others last year when she launched a “smear campaign” against Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin, alleging that Abedin and other Muslim-Americans in government are agents of the Muslim Brotherhood.

“Michele Bachmann has used her position on the Intelligence Committee to spread baseless conspiracy theories and smear the reputations of honorable public servants,” said Michael Keegan, President of People For the American Way. “Boehner himself called her actions ‘dangerous.’ It’s mysterious, then, why he has chosen to reward her reckless extremism with continued access to sensitive national security information and a powerful platform for her agenda.”

A Duluth native who just barely lost Virginia's GOP gubernatorial primary said that politicians have not gone far enough in condemning the left for violence during a rally of white nationalists in Charlottesville. "I think that the left is going to try to use this as an excuse to crack down on conservative free speech," said Corey Stewart. "I think they're going to try to use this as an excuse to remove more historical monuments."